Michael Sergeyevich Gorbachev, An Assessment

Michael Sergeyevich Gorbachev, MSB hereafter, the last president of the Soviet Union died on August 30, in Moscow. He was born on March 2 1931. President Putin of Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, paid his respects at the hospital where Gorbachev died. There was no state funeral, it was a rather state-assisted funeral. The body was kept for the public to pay homage in the famous Hall of Columns inside Moscow's House of Unions, the same place where Josef Stalin's body was put on display following his death in 1953.

Let us take a brief look at the life of this historically significant individual and then attempt to evaluate his place in history.

MSB was born in Stalin's time to a poor peasant family in the North Caucasus Kral, where there were Russians and Ukrainians. His father was Russian and mother Ukrainian. His father had baptised him as Viktor, but his mother in a secret ceremony changed his name to Michael. He attended the village school, closed for a while during World War 2 when Nazi Germany occupied the region. M SB was a voracious reader of Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Vissarion Belinsky, to name only a few.

MSB joined the Soviet youth organisation Komsomol, and got admitted to the prestigious Moscow State University in 1950 from where he graduated in 1955. His thesis was on democracy, and he argued that socialist democracy was superior to bourgeoisie democracy. He did criticize the prevailing legal norm that confession proved guilt as he knew that confession can be obtained under duress.

At the university, MSB fell in love with a philosophy student, Raisa Titarenko, and they married in 1953, the year Stalin died. She deepened his interest in philosophy. Raisa died in 1999.

I remember meeting MSB in Canada in 1983 when he was member in charge of the powerful Central Committee. He told the media that on the flight he was reading Immanuel Kant's essay on Perpetual Peace while looking at the Canadian flat plane, perfect for experimenting with below-the-radar bombing technique, very much in the news then as the Pentagon was busy with perfecting the technique to be used against Soviet Union. Dear reader, how many political leaders, present and past, would have read Kant's essay?

MSG's rise in the party, whose monopoly on political power he was destined to end , was meteoric. Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, to be followed by Andropov from whom MSG expected serious reforms. Though disappointed, MSG worked closely with Andropov who encouraged him to take on more responsibilities in addition to agriculture. In 1983 MSB delivered the annual speech marking Lenin's birthday. MSG's conviction that the system needed deep reforms was getting stronger.

Before his death in 1984, Andropov wanted MSG to succeed him, but the Polit Bureau decided that he was too young at 53. Konstantin Chernenko, 73 and ailing, often on a wheelchair, took office. MSG often had to deputize for him. When Chernenko died in 1985, the Polit Bureau was ready to appoint MSG.

Coming to how history will judge MSG, let us recall the 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich von Schiller's maxim that world history is the world court of judgement. We have seen high praise for MSG from the West, whereas he is virtually unmourned in Russia.

What did MSG aim for and what did he achieve? He wanted to reform the Soviet system. He introduced Glasnost (Openness) and Perestroika (Restructuring), to complete the de-Stalinization that followed his death initiated by Nikita Khrushchev. It is my view that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse over time and MSG only accelerated the collapse. He was not the single cause for the collapse.

Historically, it is rather naïve to look for a single cause to explain major changes. To take an example, Mahatma Gandhi did not single handedly end the British rule in the Indian subcontinent. It occurred in a certain historical setting in the post-World War 2 world. But it is true that Gandhi played a major, in fact unique, role in preparing India for freedom and in compelling the British to quit.

Blaise Pascal wrote, "Cleopatra's nose, and it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed. The obvious implication is that neither Julius Caesar nor Marc Antony would have fallen in love with her. Obviously, we need to conduct a thought experiment.

Let us imagine that Putin was in the place of MSG when the Solidarity gained power in Poland in 1988, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, when Vaclav gained power in Czechoslovakia in 1989, and when the West wanted German unification in 1990. Putin would have sent in the military to Poland and there would have rivers of blood. The Solidarity might have crumbled. There might not have been any need to cause another bloodbath in Czechoslovakia, though Putin would have resorted to it if needed. He would not have agreed to German unification and refused to withdraw the Soviet troops from East Germany.

When history takes a holistic audit, it is likely to quote a line or two from George Browning's A Grammarian's Funeral:

That low man goes on adding one to one,

His hundred's soon hit:

This high man, aiming at a million,

Misses an unit.

Did Mahatma Gandhi succeed in leaving a legacy of a secular, caring India where justice prevails? No, or rather not yet. MSG aimed high, and he failed partly because his people were not prepared to embrace freedom and responsibility.

The Soviet Union, which failed to accept MSG's reforms, was an empire with too much concentration of power. Such concentration of power whether in an individual or in the state which is only a part of the society is harmful as we are witnessing today with painful clarity. Adam Smith said, "but though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality."

Ambassador K P Fabian's latest book THE ARAB SPRING THAT WAS AND WASN'T commissioned by the Indian Council of World Affairs has been published by MacMillan Education. He is retired from the Indian Foreign Service.